According to preliminary data released by the Department of Education this summer, many for-profit colleges fared poorly on the student debt measurements.
Yet just how those thousands of veterans in college are faring remains a bit of a mystery.
First, as she admits, the recessions experienced by her sample were relatively mild, and during that time college graduates fared rather well.
The farmstead where Thorstein Veblen grew up in Nerstrand, Minn., not far from his alma mater, Carleton College, has fared better.
The breakfast buffet on the mezzanine level sounded great on paper, but the spread of warm biscuits, gravy, scrambled eggs and pancakes turned out to be a little lacking in flavor, reminiscent of college dorm fare.
In addition to standard college newspaper fare – an essay about town-gown relations in which Miller details the "condescension" inherent in giving a janitor a birthday card – Miller's 25 columns, written between September 2005 and April 2007, frequently touch on hot-button issues.
There was a plethora of food choices and none of the fried mystery shapes I remember as college cafeteria fare.
Earlier studies (many cited in this piece) have shown that, even taking into account student characteristics like race, for-profit college students fare worse than students at other institutions.
Yet even while this generation has been hit hardest, college graduates fare much better than their non-college peers, and a degree is increasingly becoming more important to 1) having a shot at entering the middle class, and 2) increasing the economic strength of our country.
And this will help put pressure on colleges that fare poorly to improve.
